


Braving Those Angry Skies

by ladymerlot



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, First Kiss, Kinda, M/M, Pining, Poor Crowley, Spies, World War II, more or less
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 15:20:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19889992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymerlot/pseuds/ladymerlot
Summary: “Please slow down, Crowley, do,” Aziraphale pleads as Crowley swerves around what could be a large tomcat or a small child. “If you carry on like this, you’ll bowl over every building left standing by the Germans between here and St. Paul’s.”Crowley has a problem. Well, he has many problems, at the moment, but they all stem from one single problem which is this: he can’t feel his feet. He can’t decide if this is more or less of a problem than the one he had ten minutes earlier, when Aziraphale had looked at Crowley for the first time in eighty years and immediately assumed he was the king of the Nazi henchmen. And not even good Nazi henchmen.





	Braving Those Angry Skies

**Author's Note:**

> Broke year-long writer's block (maybe even longer than that, yikes) to obsess over the idea of Crowley walking over consecrated ground to prevent Aziraphale from being moderately inconvenienced. Squeezed this story out of myself like the last of the toothpaste from the tube. 
> 
> Title from Vera Lynn's "The White Cliffs of Dover," because WWII.

They actually bring Crowley out to Blenheim, which should have been his first clue that something strange would happen that night. Most of the Twenty Committee works out of the palace, and never wants Crowley to be seen there, or even in the surrounding area, which is fine with Crowley: the Oxfordshire roads are hell on the Bentley. 

Usually, if they need to brief him, they bring him to St. James Street, to the old MGM building. In and out in twenty minutes, if that. Sometimes it’s quick enough that he is too early for a fashionable dinner out. He could, if he had a companion, go out for a preprandial drink at the Milroy or the Berkeley, one of the fancy spots that pretends to have never heard of rationing, for the right price. 

(Crowley’s current project is convincing Below to give him credit for rationing. So far he’s in a stalemate, as Hell is in a permanent state of semi-rationing—of overhead lighting, personal space, soap, etc.—and doesn’t understand what the big deal is.) 

But Crowley doesn’t have a companion. He once had a companion, perhaps even a friend. ( _ Oh, he’s not my friend. We’ve never met before. We don’t know each other. _ ) Although calling Aziraphale a friend is rather like calling a guillotine a vegetable peeler because both contain a blade: wrong semantically, but dead wrong spiritually. But humans have no word for a being with whom one has shared almost six thousand years of companionship, no word for the amount of trust and devotion Crowley feels for the fussiest angel Heaven has ever produced. Once, when he was very, gloriously, drunk, Crowley let himself think the word “soulmate” and was so shocked at himself he spilled the wine he was drinking down the front of his pants. (The ordeal was so humiliating he hasn’t been able to drink chardonnay since, not even a Côte de Beaune.) 

But if Crowley had to render who Aziraphale was to him in human language, in any of the human languages that have ever existed, if he absolutely  _ had  _ to, he would say: the first and last being he ever loved since being cast out of Heaven. 

Not that it’s been a point of concern lately. He hasn’t seen Aziraphale in seventy-nine years. 

Most of that, Crowley supposes, is on him. He left the park that day, the words “suicide pill” rattling in his brain, and immediately fell into a seventy-year nap. (It wasn’t a sulk. Demons don’t sulk. They do many wicked and unspeakable things but they do not  _ sulk _ .) He woke up just in time for a worldwide global economic collapse, which annoyed him immensely, and then spent the next nine years walking past Aziraphale’s bookshop in Soho, still operating, for a certain value of the word, against all odds, and losing the nerve to enter at the last minute. 

_ I have other people to fraternize with, angel. _ Why in the blazes had he said that? And more to the point, why had Aziraphale believed him? As if Aziraphale had ever once seen him with an acquaintance, let alone a friend. Aziraphale was the type that had friends, not him. That prat Petronius and his oysters, bless him. Crowley still remembers him fawning all over Aziraphale that rubbish time in Rome—it was bad enough Crowley had to deal with Caligula, who was above and beyond even Crowley’s paygrade (and he doesn’t say that often), but then he had to endure hours of Petronius making unsubtle cock jokes while describing the aphrodisiacal qualities of oysters, and sweet Aziraphale, sweet bleeding innocent Aziraphale, laughing pleasantly even at the crude bits, asking intelligent questions about oyster preparation and goading Crowley into trying something other than the house brown and putting his hand on Crowley’s arm and smiling that apple-cheeked smile and— 

Hell—Heaven—bless it, he misses Aziraphale.

―――

He meets his contact, a man named Jones with a pale moon face and helplessly crooked teeth, at the back door of the carriage house. They’ve got him mostly on retrieval, at the moment. Literal retrieval—the Abwehr keeps parachuting potential spies into England, all of whom miraculously turn themselves over to MI5 as soon as they clap eyes on Crowley. Some of them have even proved useful going back the other way, though officially Crowley isn’t supposed to know anything about that.

Crowley can’t say exactly why he’s doing what he’s doing. Certainly it’s not very demonly of him. Below loves HItler; demons are popping up like daffodils in the springtime to support the Führer. The chaos, the fear, the sheer waste—what more could Hell want? And yet here Crowley is, doing exactly the opposite of his instructions as muleishly as possible, and if he has to spell it out, he would say that Hitler is a wanker and Crowley doesn’t want to wait around to see what happens when he crosses the Channel. And by all appearances, Heaven is bloody well asleep. 

The room Jones leads him into is small and dark, only a table in the center of the floor under a single bulb, piled high with papers. Some are photographs, taken from odd angles and a little blurry—of informants, maybe, or of their double agents’ contacts. Crowley runs his eyes over the table to make sure there aren’t any of him there (it wouldn’t do to allow evidence that he was flouting Hell’s wishes to be floating around where any idiot could find it) and then he sees it: a familiar spritz of pale hair. A tartan bow tie. 

An almost electric shock passes through him. He realizes, belatedly, that he’s made some kind of noise, and his mouth is hanging open. 

“This man,” he says, and taps on the photograph of Aziraphale talking to a pretty woman with dark hair. He glares at his fingers until they stop trembling. “What do you want with him?” 

“Ah, that poor bugger,” Jones says. “Got in a bit over his head.”

Crowley’s hearing fuzzes for a moment or two. He can only focus on a piece of creamed spinach wedged in one of Jones’s unfortunate teeth. Blood, which he does not have, seems to be pulsing hard and frantic behind his eyeballs. 

“Walked right into it,” Jones is saying. “Poor bastard. But we can’t bail out every idiot who wanders into a German trap, can we? People think espionage is a walk in the park—they tell a few white lies at the grocer’s or at the club and they think, well I could be a spy, then. Bloody hell. Swanning in looking like it’s the Henley sodding Regata.”

“What will happen to him?” Crowley’s voice is in shreds. He barely recognizes it. 

“I suppose they’ll shoot him. Fraulein Kleinschmidt’s cover as Rose Montgomery is too valuable for them to lose. They don’t know that we know, of course, but can’t be leaving any loose ends. Wait a moment, where are you—Crowley? Where are you going?” 

Crowley was back in the Bentley doing a cool hundred and five on the road to London before he realized he had moved at all.

―――

“Although I  _ am _ rather put out,” Aziraphale is saying, some time later, as they drive away from the wreckage of the church, “that I wasted such a good line on such an unworthy audience. I had it planned out for weeks. Of course, I suppose it looks like hubris from the outside. I  _ was _ rather proud.” He glances at Crowley and gives him a tiny, pleased smile. “Thought it might be a cracking good story to tell you, when we reunited. But I should have known you would swoop in and save the day. My heroic demon.” 

If Crowley had been able to pay even a quarter of the attention he usually paid Aziraphale, he would have been surprised by the moony, dumbstruck look on the angel’s face. Crowley has imagined that look on Aziraphale’s face no less than seven hundred and twenty times since they last saw each other, so to actually see it—to see Aziraphale gaze at him with his mouth slightly open, eyes wide and adoring, his hands wrapped around the books Crowley saved for him without hope or agenda, should have been a coup. As it stands, Crowley hears about one word in three. He can barely see at all. He is focusing most of his attention on working the Bentley’s brakes and gas pedals with his mind instead of his feet. But occasionally a few words or even a whole phrase penetrate the painful fog inside his head. What unmitigated ass was teaching Aziraphale American phrases in the first place?  _ Played for suckers.  _ Hell’s teeth. Next thing Crowley knew, he would be speaking like Al Capone and carrying around a Tommy gun, for somebody’s sake.

“Please slow down, Crowley, do,” Aziraphale pleads as Crowley swerves around what could be a large tomcat or a small child. “If you carry on like this, you’ll bowl over every building left standing by the Germans between here and St. Paul’s.”

Crowley has a problem. Well, he has many problems, at the moment, but they all stem from one single problem which is this: he can’t feel his feet. He can’t decide if this is more or less of a problem than the one he had ten minutes earlier, when Aziraphale had looked at Crowley for the first time in eighty years and immediately assumed he was the king of the Nazi henchmen. And not even good Nazi henchmen. Doesn’t Aziparphale know him at all? 

But no, the feet thing is worse, because what had begun as a can’t-feel-his-feet thing is quickly progressing into a can’t-feel-his-shins thing. He thought himself so clever, hopping about like a vaudeville tap dancer, keeping as little of his body touching the consecrated ground as possible.  _ Like being on the beach in bare feet. _ He hadn’t been lying, not at first. He hadn’t noticed the floor was too hot to bear until it had burned away not just the bottom layer of his shoes and socks but the soles of his feet as well. 

Shock had kept him upright for a moment, and stubbornness for a moment after that. The distraction of saving Aziraphale’s books hadn’t helped matters, dividing his energies between two impossible tasks. And now Crowley was beginning to realize that he might be in a bit over his head.

“Coming in, Crowley?” They’ve arrived, somehow, at the bookshop, closed up for the night and nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the street in the darkness of the blackout. Aziraphale turns back to him at the front step, the bag of books cradled gently in his arms. “You  _ must _ allow me to say thank you, and I have a Chateau Cheval Blanc I’ve been holding onto for just this occasion. Well, not this occasion, exactly.” He reaches the door, and still facing the street, taps it with his foot so it swings fully open behind him. “I mean, I couldn’t have predicted the Nazis, of course. Dreadfully rude of them to doublecross me like that. Although I suppose I  _ was  _ doublecrossing them. But in the name of the greater good, so that’s all right. But what I mean to say is, well, it’s no fun at all to by oneself, is it? And I’ve got terrifically good blackout curtains. So come inside, my dear. I’ve missed you.” 

And since Crowley would have to be dead and discorporated to not react to that, he levers himself out of the Bentley and hobbles inside. 

“And don’t think you’re going to get out of talking about  _ Anthony _ ,” Aziraphale calls from the back room. “We don’t see each other for eighty-odd years and suddenly you have a whole new name? I don’t expect to have a vote but I should have at least been able to submit a suggestion. Not that Anthony isn’t lovely, of course. You see—it’s already growing on me! I told you it would.”

Crowley allows himself a moment to be stupefied by the pain. He thinks, for one horrifying second, that he’s actually going to heave his guts all over the floor, something he didn’t even know his human body could do. He wonders if one could only partially discorporate, and realizes he doesn’t actually know what happens to demons who walk on hallowed ground—he had assumed, upon not immediately bursting into flame or melting away like hot tar, that he could get by with only a little discomfort. More fool him. 

_ As I recall _ , he wants to say,  _ your suggestions for my new name when we saw each other at the Crucifixion were Asmodeus and Mephistopheles. So no, you absolutely do not get a vote _ .  _ You barely get to put a slip in the suggestion box. _ But he can’t force his mouth to form the words. 

The pain radiates up his legs in waves. He reaches the piece of furniture closest to the door—a lumpy, overstuffed chaise lounge so hideous it looks like it’s trying to hide itself in the shadows, out of sight—and flings himself across it, leaving his ruined feet dangling in the air. Somehow, this grants him no relief. He groans into the arm of the hideous chair, and when that isn’t enough, bites the cushion. Somehow in the past two minute he’s lost his hat, and his sunglasses aren’t far behind. His mind feels a long way from his body, floating above him. Looking down on him, as God must have, when he fell.

He giggles. 

“Now you have to promise me you’ll savor this first glass, and not swig it like it’s moonshine and you’re an extra in a cowboy film.” Crowley hears the sounds of Aziraphale picking up two glasses, coming back into the room. “Crowley! What on earth is the matter?” 

Crowley tries to lift his head to tell Aziraphale it’s all right, he just needs a moment to pull himself together, stop worrying, for Satan’s sake, but discovers that he has lost control not only of his mouth but his entire head. A dark and bilious sensation is creeping over his knees and up to his thighs, and something smells of smoke. It might be him. 

“Ngk,” he says instead. 

Glasses shatter, and Aziraphale curses quietly, and then he’s kneeling at Crowley’s side, brushing a tentative hand over his hair. His palm feels unspeakably cool against Crowley’s forehead. 

“S’alright, angel,” he says finally. “Just—just need to…” 

“Are you hurt?” Aziraphale runs his hands lightly over the front of Crowley’s jacket and then underneath, searching for hidden wounds. “Oh, if something happened when the church came down, I’ll never forgive myself. I thought—I was being so careful, but I was so overexcited, and—”

“Wasn’t you, angel.” Crowley manages to almost sit up. To his shock, Aziraphale slides a hand against his cheek and holds up his head. He threads the other through Crowley’s hair, gently, the way he does everything, and Crowley is so full of emotions he can feel them sloshing around inside of him. “It was—it was—”

And he realizes, very suddenly, that this could be it. Not a discoporation, partial or otherwise; no retreating back Below to await a new body and a new assignment in disgrace as the demon who was stupid enough to walk into a church. Holy water can destroy the essence of a demon beyond hope of saving—why wouldn’t holy ground do the same? 

“Your  _ feet _ ,” Aziraphale gasps. He draws back and gives Crowley a look of horror so dramatic Crowley almost laughs. Aziraphale should have been on the stage, he really should. Richard Burbage who? “My dear,  _ what _ —” His eyes grow as wide as marbles. “Consecrated ground.” 

“Worth it,” Crowley says immediately. “For you, angel. Worth it. Would...would do it again.” 

“Crowley…” Then, so soft Crowley can barely hear it: “You’re dying.” 

This, as far as Crowley can tell, is an accurate assessment of the facts. It certainly feels more like dying than anything he’s ever done. Having been around for as long as he has, he’s seen a lot of death, thought about what it would feel like if something irreversible happened to him. The pain he’s always expected, although perhaps not this amount, in this intensity. But, he supposes, that’s the way life is—the imagination has to give out at some point. 

“For you...always for you, Aziraphale.” 

Aziraphale’s scrunched, pale face appears above him. He quivers with the liquid rage of a small, defenseless rodent. “Absolutely not. What were you thinking, Crowley? Oh, this is worse than 1861. Why must you constantly try to destroy yourself? It would have only been a little bit of paperwork. Nothing worth this.” 

“Would do it again,” Crowley repeats. 

“But  _ why? _ ” 

“Since...since Eden,” Crowley tries to explain, as Aziraphale maneuvers himself under Crowley’s prone form and curls them around each other on the chaise. If he could, Crowley would purr. Despite the pain, despite everything—being close to Aziraphale is a gift. “I’ve been yours for so long. Since the beginning.” 

“Crowley—”

“Because you showed mercy,” Crowley chokes out. “To the humans. They were—were fallen, were disgraced in the eyes of God, and you...were merciful to them. Gave ‘em the sword.  _ Your _ sword. It had been eons since I had seen mercy. Forgot what it looked like. Since then, it’s...it’s looked like you.” 

“No, don’t you dare do this. Crowley, don’t you—not after I’ve just…I won’t allow it. Crowley, do you hear me? I won’t allow it.” 

There are worse ways to go, Crowley reflects, than cradled in Aziraphale’s arms. In fact, if Crowley could have picked a way to face whatever oblivion followed his damnation, he would have picked exactly this. Well, he wouldn’t have chosen to ruin his shoes. But in the soft light of the bookshop, his face pressed against Aziraphale’s silly waistcoat which smells of clove and honey and a little bit of bombed-out church, Aziraphale’s arms around him and Aziraphale’s hands in his hair—it’s honestly better than what he imagined for himself. His eyes begin to drift close, and he thinks: if this were all, this would be enough. 

Then he realizes Aziraphale is praying. 

Not in a language Crowley understands, but. But. There is an echo, an aftertaste, a string tied to the base of his sternum that pulls him in a direction he doesn’t know towards something he doesn’t understand. He knows, without knowing, that this is the language of angels, his mother tongue. It washes over him in a sweet cold wave, one final kindness from Aziraphale the merciful. 

Kind of him to take away the pain, too. 

Crowley sits bolt upright, almost knocking his forehead against Aziraphale’s. He scrambles back against the armrest, distantly aware that his feet and knees and hands are healed; he can still feel the cool tingle of Aziraphale’s power running through him. His shoes shine as if he just polished them. 

Aziraphale rolls his head, cracking the vertebrae in his neck one by one. “Oh goodness. Haven’t had to do a healing like that in millennia. No more miracles for me for a while, I’m positively wiped.” He gives Crowley a self-satisfied smile, which fades as Crowley continues to look at him in horror. As everything he’s said to Aziraphale in the past quarter hour reverberates in his head. 

“Crowley,” Aziraphale says in a voice so kind Crowley feels like his collarbone will snap in half. 

“It wasn’t—I didn’t mean—I—I—” Impossible to continue. He briefly considers walking out into the night and hoping a bombed-out building will collapse on him in the dark. 

“Well, I’ll be heading off, then,” he says, in a voice that is both too loud and too riven with pain for such an inane statement. He tries to stand up but his legs are weak and wobbly like a baby lamb’s; he only manages to deposit himself directly onto the floor. 

Aziraphale holds up his hands. “Please, my dear, don’t panic.” 

“I’m not panicking.” He scuttles back on his hands and feet until his back collides with one of the bookshelves; he contemplates unbalancing it in the hopes that he’ll be crushed beneath it. Easier than waiting on a bombed-out building. Never in his entire long, long life has he felt such pure, excruciating humiliation. He is incandescent with it.  _ Would do it again. Always for you, Aziraphale. I’ve been yours for so long.  _

Fucking heaven. Infernal torture and dismemberment would be preferable to this. 

“Now my dear, you mustn’t run away. We should...we should discuss this.” 

“I’d rather go take a Messerschmitt to the face, if it’s all the same to you.” 

“Oh Crowley.” Aziraphale slides to the floor, his arms held up like he’s approaching a feral animal stuck in a trap. When Crowley doesn’t immediately turn into a snake and slither under the baseboards, Aziraphale begins to move towards him, slowly, crawling on his hands and knees.

With a sharp cramp of panic, Crowley realizes he’s misplaced his glasses, and his face is unshielded from the world, from Heaven and Hell and most importantly, from Aziraphale. 

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale says, “for whatever I’ve said that has made you believe that when you showed yourself to me, all of you, I would turn you away. I realize, now, that I’ve been, well, a bit of a coward. But you’ve always been braver than I am, from the first. I didn’t think of it as bravery, you see—used to think you were just incorrigible, that you just couldn’t follow orders, it wasn’t in your blood. If Hell told you to not consort with an angel, you would do it as a matter of course. Just to do it. But that’s not what this was about, is it?” 

Crowley, exquisitely aware of the rise and fall of his own chest, can only shake his head. 

Aziraphale takes one of Crowley’s hands between his two soft, plump ones. When he raises it to his mouth and kisses it, Crowley feels like he could burst into flame; still, it’s nothing compared to when Aziraphale twists his hand to place a kiss on the inside of his wrist, or when he slides softly into Crowley’s lap and kisses him on the mouth, gently, no tongue, and the tenderness of it makes Crowley want to howl. 

“You walked into a church to save me,” Aziraphale murmurs between kisses. “You  _ saved my books _ when I forgot them. My darling, my sweet, sweet Crowley. My  _ Anthony _ .”

“I adore you,” Crowley rasps. If he didn’t know better, he would assume he was drunk. Everywhere Aziraphale touches feels golden. 

“This kissing business is quite fun, isn’t it,” says Aziraphale happily. “The humans have certainly got some things figured out, no matter what else they do.” As if on cue, the air raid siren begins to shriek again somewhere in the distance. Unconsciously, Crowley pulls Aziraphale closer to him, as if he could single-handedly save him from the entire Luftwaffe. And who knows—if put to the test, perhaps he could. 

Aziraphale runs the pads of his fingers up Crowley’s neck. “I don’t know about you, my dear, but I am much too old to be sitting on the floor like this,” he says. Crowley, for his part, has entirely forgotten they are sitting on the floor at all. “So, let’s move back to the chaise, and I’ll make a pot of tea—”

“Wine. A pot of wine. I mean, a bottle of wine. We need—wine.”

“Very well, then. I’ll open the Cheval Blanc after all. And then, we’re going to talk. I mean it, Crowley.” Aziraphale gives him an impish smile. “I want you to tell me everything.” 

“I wouldn’t even know where to start.” 

Aziraphale kisses the side of his mouth. Crowley, tremulous and greedy, turns his face and kisses him, and their plan to move from the floor is derailed several more minutes. 

“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” Aziraphale suggests. 

Crowley thinks back to the beginning, which was also their beginning—a garden, a sword, a perfect world chewed up and spat out—and knows that’s as good a place as any.

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly can't believe the things this show has made me feel. It's unbearable.


End file.
